Stories, contingent materialities, and moral inquiry: Response to Simone, MacLeavy, Kim, and Lake

Abstract

In response to the thoughtful and generous commentaries of Simone, MacLeavy, Kim, and Lake in my paper “Bubble Clash,” I lay out three considerations for social inquiry and knowledge production. First, learning from MacIntyre’s discussion of Jane Austen, whose stories exemplify an imaginative moral inquiry in which different rationalities and virtues collide, I highlight the role of stories in moral progress in which our sensitivity and responsiveness to people and things are increased. Second, I expand on Simone’s and MacLeavy’s notion of contingent materialities that mandate storytellers’ work to be always in progress and “in the middle.” I connect this line of thought with Kim’s “dreamscapes” of the municipalities in Georgia where the past, present, and future are being spatially materialized, the examples of which include the continuing legacies of institutional anti-Blackness concurrently existing with immigrants’ growing physical predominance in “White-fled” areas. Finally, I return to Lake’s pragmatism and its emphasis on moral inquiry. No matter how complex, ungraspable, and perturbing the world may seem, the wisdom of pragmatism invites us to start from questioning the purpose of our writing act: why do we write and for whom do we write?